You want your Dodge/Parry equal to eachother, while in combat. Get your Dodge down to around 16% (% may change depending on what your Parry is), and when you're in combat the dodge from the trinket will equal out to match up with your Parry. Since you can take alot of Dodge out of reforging, due to the trinket, you can reforge into hit/expertise, so when you're hitting the boss you will easily be able to keep your stacks up. All this will allow you to do is squeeze more dps out of your gear when it becomes very important progressing into Heroics. My health is at 190k with no stam trinkets or gems. It took me a while to understand this concept of you dont need to be CTC capped while out of combat concept, how the concept of how the trinket works, and how good it acually makes the trinket, because at first glance, *ew*.

Good luck, and hope this helps!

Last edited by GMPoison on Mon Mar 19, 2012 6:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

GMPoison wrote:My health is at 190k with no stam trinkets or gems. It took me a while to understand this concept of you dont need to be CTC capped while out of combat concept, how the concept of how the trinket works, and how good it acually makes the trinket, because at first glance, *ew*.

Except, it's still a shitty trinket. It should still be "ew" at the second, third, and all subsequent glances.

You get more CTC from a heroic Firelands trinket, in addition to a useful secondary effect. Even though the 880 dodge rating is over-budget for static stats, it's still weaker in the departments that matter for heroic DS (CTC and stamina).

190k is pretty low for heroic DS. I have around 222k unbuffed at ilvl 401.

Eh, not especially. I'd still rather have more stamina for that fight. You only ever have to take two stacks of sunder, so it's not critical that you avoid anything. On 25H I just use my default Spidersilk+Indomitable combination.

Again, Blackhorn still tests a tank's ability to survive burst. Dodge/parry really only become useful when you care about damage taken on time scales of 20s or more, when you can start to count on statistical averaging being relevant. If you're still going to have a good chance to take 2-3 90k hits in a row, I'd much rather have the stamina, absorb bubbles, and so on to push EH and survive the burst.

GMPoison wrote:My health is at 190k with no stam trinkets or gems. It took me a while to understand this concept of you dont need to be CTC capped while out of combat concept, how the concept of how the trinket works, and how good it acually makes the trinket, because at first glance, *ew*.

Except, it's still a shitty trinket. It should still be "ew" at the second, third, and all subsequent glances.

You get more CTC from a heroic Firelands trinket, in addition to a useful secondary effect. Even though the 880 dodge rating is over-budget for static stats, it's still weaker in the departments that matter for heroic DS (CTC and stamina).

190k is pretty low for heroic DS. I have around 222k unbuffed at ilvl 401.

222k unbuffed as a prot paladin with no stam gems and one stam trinket?

If you gem for Stamina, that sounds about right - I'm at 220k unbuffed, but I still have a few mastery gems left in my 397 gear. I think I could hit around 225k if I removed those and reforged for a bit more mastery. 401 iLvl, one stamina trinket.

<edit> Yup, according to CharDev I'm at 102.9% with flask/feast, 103.67% with mastery food and flask. I can shift one green gem (cloak) over to a blue gem if I use a feast, and three (cloak, gloves, shield) green->blue trades if I use mastery food.

Also, I didn't say I wasn't using stam gems. I said 190k was low for DS. The reason it's low is likely because you're not using stam gems, and you're not using stam gems because you need to gem mastery to maintain block cap. Resolve isn't helping you at all in that department, because 880 dodge is only about as good as 283ish mastery for CTC. By using a decent mastery trinket instead of Resolve, you could shift around 170 mastery back to stamina (~250 stam), which is another 3.5k health or so. You could probably gain more than that even by adjusting gear a little more carefully, and picking good mastery/avoid options instead of avoid/avoid or threat/avoid in slots where it's an option.